


merciless eyes

by rainingover



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Anal Sex, Assassins & Hitmen, Bad Decisions, Blow Jobs, Enemies to Lovers, Espionage, Falling In Love, M/M, No explicit violence but references to it, Rough Sex, Shower Sex, enemies who are lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:07:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26815585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainingover/pseuds/rainingover
Summary: Mark finds Johnny's file is the standard fare to the most part: He's been to a lot of places and met a lot of people, some of which have later been found dead. He's certainly made a lot of enemies, which Mark has always found is useful when planning to kill someone.He's handsome, too. Handsome in a way that makes Mark feel uncomfortable, that means he can see Johnny’s face behind his eyelids when he shuts his eyes.(Or: Mark and Johnny aren't on the same side, but it doesn't stop them from being drawn to each other.)
Relationships: Mark Lee/Suh Youngho | Johnny
Comments: 58
Kudos: 370





	merciless eyes

**Author's Note:**

> a while ago i asked for quick prompts to write drabbles & an anon sent me "johmark: enemies to lovers"  
> instead of a drabble, this happened.  
> i hope someone enjoys it!

Mark Lee was eighteen when he was recruited by Joy and he was twenty two when he was given the honour of being trusted to lead missions alone. 

Work hard, his parents always said. Work hard and you’ll succeed. But his parents think that he works away on location, running IT for a national firm. They had no idea about his job when he was eighteen, and they still don’t. They never will, which is all kinds of fucked up, but it’s part of the job.

Except, it’s not just a job. Now that he’s twenty five, it’s his whole life. It’s not a job, it’s the person he is, his whole entire being. _He_ is made of state secrets. _He_ is the blood disappearing into the plug-hole of a restaurant washroom and he is the heartbeat that rings in his ears for hours afterwards. Sometimes, Mark feels invincible, but he knows he isn’t. He’s only made of skin and bone, and he bleeds just like anyone else. 

Still, Mark doesn’t like to show any weakness. Only the shadows on the wall of cold hotel rooms bear witness to his vulnerabilities, only they see him tired and withdrawn, scared of doing badly, and unravelling at the thought. He can’t risk anyone glimpsing even a tiny sliver of weakness in his veneer— better men than him have lost everything to a moment of weakness, and Mark refuses to become a name whispered like gossip in the halls of the department. 

There's a small park, not far from his apartment, where Mark hides himself sometimes. He goes there to breathe, and then he leaves himself there— imagines he's leaving a pile of human bones on the grass— and plasters the mask of a man with no name over his boyish features, leaves the park and catches a cab to where his next file will be waiting. Today the cab driver asks him if he’s on his way to college, and Mark sets him with a blank look.

He's always had boyish features. Maybe once it annoyed him, but now he considers it an advantage. It means that his target doesn't always see the weapon he’s yielding until it's too late.

Even if they do see it, it doesn't matter: Mark never misses.

He’s always worked hard and he thinks his parents would be proud if they knew. At least, that’s what he tells himself. It helps get him through the nights.

* * *

Johnny drinks expensive whisky and watches the door of the bar he’s in for anyone interesting that might turn up to kill him.

He has eyes everywhere— his back, his hands, his hair. He's _made_ of eyes and his eyes are wary of everyone he meets. They have to be; it’s part of the job, after all. It’s what he signed up for when he sold his soul to the cause of National Security. 

He works in National Security, and yet he hasn’t felt secure about anything since he signed his name on that dotted line in the plush office in the government buildings when he was barely twenty. The irony of it isn’t lost on him.

He takes his seat along the back wall of the dive-bar he's slipped into on the sketchier side of the city and watches the red, mottled faces of men with wives who won’t see them tonight. At least they’ll go home in the end, he thinks. A lot of the men he meets don’t live to see anywhere other than a shallow grave.

Johnny admits that this is not how he has always envisioned his late twenties going, but he knows he can’t change anything now, so Johnny never sits with his back to a door, and he watches, and he waits for something new to happen, but nothing ever seems to change anymore.

He is given a job, gets what he needs, kills who he asked to and then he's sent to a new place, to a new job, except there is nothing _new_ about it at all.

* * *

“This one’s come in from the top, so it’ll be a good one,” Yuta says, sliding the file across the desk. “It's the usual brief: find him and get rid of him before he completes his mission.” Yuta doesn't sugar coat it; he doesn't see the point. Mark knows that Yuta believes that the ends justify the means. Even when the means is death. 

Mark opens the file to the front page and finds a name, a date of birth, a nationality. There's a photo underneath this, but he doesn't look at it yet. He shuts the file again and says, "I’m meant to do this one alone? Isn’t this guy known for being, I don’t know, _slippery_?”

"Don’t you think you can do it?" Yuta eyes him, wants him to argue. Yuta gets bored now that he's not out on the field. He’s frustrated with it all— the whole system, but he daren’t voice it, not here, where the walls have ears. 

“That’s not what I said.” Mark crosses his arms.

“Do you not _want_ to do it?” Yuta presses him. “Do you want to be tied to a desk instead?” 

Mark doesn’t know exactly what happened on Yuta’s last job, but it definitely ended badly, and no one wants that. No one wants to be reduced to Man In An Office. Not when they have been Weapon and Holder of Secrets and International Spy and other things much more glamorous than a Case Handler to other agents.

Power is a drug, and Yuta’s clearly got withdrawals, but Mark gets it, he’d probably be the same if this was taken from him. He’s tired, but not _that_ tired. There is only one thing worse than death for people like them and it’s being relieved from duty. The shadows on the wall would snicker at him all the more for it, and they bother him enough as it is. 

"I'll get it done,” Mark says and Yuta’s shoulders relax. “I’ll see you in a few weeks, I guess.”

Yuta gives him a half smile. It says, _Try not to die._ “Send me a postcard!” he calls to Mark’s back. "Or buy me a shot-glass from a gift-shop!"

Mark can’t help but laugh, despite how serious this building always feels. It’s okay, sometimes, this way of life. 

* * *

Johnny tries his hardest to find happiness in the darkness of corridors and corners, but it’s not an easy task. 

He’s been in this game for almost ten years, which is longer than a lot of the people he’s worked with. Jaehyun was only around for a few years, and Johnny doesn’t know where he went. He wasn’t _privy_ to that information, apparently, even though they killed men together for a year and a half. 

Doyoung had argued back when they’d been debriefed after that mission. Had said, “Why can’t we know? We’re not the enemy here. We’re his _friends_.”

He hadn’t even been given a response. Ten's eyes had said he wanted to tell them, but they knew he couldn't. He'd asked them both to leave the office and wait for further instructions on their next targets, and they’d obeyed because— well, what else could they do?

Afterwards, Doyoung had sworn, tears in his eyes. He’d kicked at the wall, emotional and unlike how Johnny had ever seen him. He’d had to take him by the shoulders and had said, “Don’t you get it? We’re not people, we’re _tools_. You should know that, it’s what we both signed up for, is it not?”

“Don’t you ever wish you hadn’t signed up at all?” Doyoung had asked him, face ashen, crest-fallen, human throughout it all. “I do.”

Johnny hasn’t seen Doyoung in over two years. 

He doesn’t even know if Doyoung is alive. It’s a strange sort of existence, and Johnny can’t pretend he hasn’t become disillusioned over the years. Still, it’s not like he can just _leave_ his job. The only way to leave the service is in a body bag, and he won’t be doing that— at least not without a damn good fight.

Johnny travels to another faceless city with an underbelly of secrets, watches his back, and waits for his next instruction. 

* * *

Mark finds Johnny's file is the standard fare to the most part: He's been to a lot of places and met a lot of people, some of which have later been found dead. He's certainly made a lot of enemies, which Mark has always found is useful when planning to kill someone. 

He's handsome, too. Handsome in a way that makes Mark feel uncomfortable, that means he can see Johnny’s face behind his eyelids when he shuts his eyes.

Johnny is tall and broad. He doesn't have boyish features. He has big hands.

Mark has never jerked off to the photos in a target's file before. Has never even dreamt anyone _would_ but he does it that night, alone in his room, and it fills him with a guilt that is so far removed from the guilt that he _doesn't_ feel when he stands over the dead, that it only makes him come harder into his hand.

The shadows on the wall watch him and they dance to the beat of his heart, which refuses to stay quiet, still beating in his ears as he washes his hands and stares at his tired reflection in the mirror.

He shreds and burns the documents as is mandatory. Burns the photographs and the file itself. Except for one photo, which Mark slides into the back pocket of his case, which is packed and ready from his last job. 

He’s on a plane within six hours, with a three-step plan: locate, pinpoint, kill. It’s a job like any other, but Mark feels nervous for the first time in years.

* * *

Johnny likes to search for more human ways of feeling something that don’t always involve cold metal or the warm stickiness of blood.

Johnny drives slowly in his showy rental car just to fuck with the drivers behind him and make them remember to stop and enjoy the view once in a while. Johnny throws coins into fountains and he pays for the person behind him in line for coffee. He loves early mornings that are really late nights, and he pets stray cats and tips well in restaurants.

These things are good, but Johnny knows that he himself isn’t, not really. No, Johnny is violence, he is a means of extraction, and no amount of paying forward can absolve that. He came to terms with that a long while ago, but it makes him feel good to make people smile. 

He _likes_ people, which he knows is ironic considering his job has the amusing caveat of having to silence some of them to get his work done. He likes learning about people, he’s good at caring about them; he genuinely _cares_. Except, caring isn’t exactly one of the skills he gets to put into action very often. Caring about them doesn’t kill anyone.

His body count isn’t something that Johnny likes to think about, and he isn’t _looking_ to add to it, but he will if his hand is forced, and his hand has been forced four times already this year. Survival is innate, and so is handling weapons he'd never even seen before he was nineteen.

Johnny gives his shoes and scarf to a homeless man he meets under the bypass and talks with the elderly woman selling flowers outside of the central station. When she laughs at his jokes, he considers it a win. 

(It doesn’t absolve for any of the bodies, but it makes him feel warmer inside, and makes him forget what he does for a while.)

* * *

Mark knows that Taeyong is also on this job, as a back-up, because he's seen him crossing the street outside that little deli he’s found that sells amazing pulled beef sandwiches. 

Taeyong is in the city, but Mark can't wave or call his name when he sees him. He can't call him up later and say, "Let's meet up for drinks," not like he wishes he could. Like he would if they really worked in IT, like their government resumes suggest. Mark has never worked in IT. He has, however, learnt how to end a life so quickly that sometimes he swears time stops for him. When this happens, and the target takes their final breath, Mark swears the air is ripped from his lungs in a terrifying wave of relief.

It’s funny, he thinks sometimes, that he dabbles in such extremes— life and death and blood and breathing— when he was recruited in a Starbucks, of all places.

Recruited in a fucking _Starbucks_ , in a store full of students, frappe-obsessed teenagers, and him— him, sat opposite a plain clothed agent, talking in code about the things they know and the things they want him to help them with. He wonders how many people realise that such meetings take place in such plain view, but Mark knows better than most how easy it is not to see what you don’t need to. 

Yuta remotely downloads an app to Mark's phone that plays white noise and tranquil ambient sounds. He falls asleep to static and dreams of drowning while in a city hundreds of miles from the coast, and then he sets about to track the movements of Johnny Suh. When he wakes up he thanks Yuta, asks him how he knew Mark couldn't sleep.

"None of us can sleep," Yuta says. "Plus, we're tracking your waking hours."

Of course they are. The intelligence services follow him across the world as he follows Johnny, and Yuta messages him every few days with new intel, as well as with restaurant recommendations for the cities he passes through. 

Mark ignores the recommendations, he prefers to order room-service and watch cable television while he plans the rest of the mission, and then he moves onto another city, falls asleep to ocean sounds and dreams of dying of thirst. 

When he wakes up, his mouth is dry and there’s a ringing in his ears. “We’ve located him”, Yuta tells him the next time he calls. “I’m sending you the coordinates. Looks like he’s tracking one of the benefactors of the last election, so he knows where the secrets are. This job is going to be a quick one, I think.”

Mark dresses, packs his toothbrush and moves on: clinical, quick, no traces left behind. He’s good at this.

* * *

The thing about being a spy that nobody warned Johnny about is that danger can be addictive and being close to death can be a fucking _trip_ , especially when you spend most of your time alone and haven't had a personal conversation that doesn't include a lie in years.

Johnny has been lonely for a long time. Having no friends, never being home, it takes a toll. His hotel rooms are too quiet, and the TV is too loud. Even the shadows of the dead have left him, so it's just him and a hard mattress and the stray cat he sneaked in under his coat, eating overpriced salmon from room-service in his lap.

He should be looking for a secret tonight— that’s why he’s been sent here, to this city. There’s a series of meetings going on between three of the wealthiest business-men on the continent, and one of them has been taking money from a foreign diplomat. There are secrets hidden in that money, and Johnny is meant to extract them, no matter what it takes. But the secrets don't want to be found, or maybe he just doesn't care enough to find them, not yet. 

Firstly, he wants to wander underpasses, pay for stranger's coffee, and share smiles with flower sellers, and if someone comes to try and stop him, he’ll just have to handle them.

Someone _is_ coming, he can feel it in the way the hairs on his arms stand on end when he hears footsteps outside of his hotel room door. He’ll be ready when they arrive.

He orders more room-service for the himself (and the cat) and sleeps with a gun under his pillow, one eye on the door. 

No one comes.

* * *

Mark knows the reason that Johnny is here, in this particular city, at this particular time, is because of the meetings going on between some of the most powerful businesses in the world. Each of them are linked to a sum of money that no one can trace, that might have come from a corrupt government official or from the sale of a secret that should not have been released. A secret his side need to keep.

Mark doesn't need to know what the secret is, he just needs to know who to kill. Johnny is employed by the intelligence services ran by Lee Donghyuck, and it’s Johnny’s job to steal the secrets, so it's Mark's job to kill him first. It's pretty stupidly simple, really.

When Mark first sees Johnny in the flesh, his first thought is that Johnny is taller than Mark even imagined he could be, even though his height is written in plain black and white in his file and his photographs suggest an imposing figure. He’s taller than Mark imagined, and the knowledge of it means he has to unbutton the collar of his shirt so that he can breathe. 

He finds Johnny, he tracks him, and within nine hours of being in his shadow he knows where he lays his head, which floor, which room number, the layout of the room. He even knows the thread count of the sheets on the bed. 

He sends a message back home to confirm his findings, and then he calculates a plan: Shadows, mask of a man with no name, alleyway, a single shot to the head. He never misses, he’s quick, he works hard.

Tomorrow night, he thinks, and then home to debrief and to water his new hanging basket of petunias. Maybe he’ll be allowed a few days rest, he thinks, but if he isn’t, he doesn’t mind. His determination is what he’s known for; Mark has never done a bad job.

He’s skilled and he’s driven, but it’s not just that— it’s that he takes _nothing_ for granted. He doesn’t get cocky, and in turn he never fucks up.

Everyone has a weakness, though.

* * *

Johnny counts out coins and leaves them in little piles on the counter. “Keep the change,” he tells the man serving, who looks at him strangely as he leaves.

He doesn’t notice the man across the street, not at first. He doesn’t know that there’s someone watching him, waiting on him, tracking his every step. He hasn’t noticed that, so this guy must be _good_.

In fact, Johnny only notices him at all because he’s gorgeous— big, doe eyes and a sharp, killer, jawline. Slim, but not skinny, black hair and a mouth that Johnny would like to lick into. 

Johnny notices Mark and _then_ he realises he’s being followed by him. 

It keeps him smiling all of the way back to his hotel. This is who he been waiting for, he thinks. He wants to kiss that jaw, feel the outline of his ribs under pale skin. 

Johnny _wants_ him. 

Maybe it’s because he’s lonely or maybe it’s the amount of fucking blows to the head he’s endured over the last decade. Maybe it’s just because, at heart, he’s always been a hopeless romantic— except his first love was his job, and he’s over that now. Maybe he wants a new love, or at least to make pretend until one of them has to die.

He sleeps with two cats on his bed and his gun under his pillow, and dreams of the eyes in the dark, of sharp features and ferocity and of meeting his match, one Johnny can’t wait to set a fire with.

When he wakes up, he lies in bed and logs into base to update them. He tells them the truth; that someone from another agency is trailing him. They'll find out one way or another. _Describe them,_ he’s told, and his fingers hover over the keys on his laptop. 

_Couldn’t see their face,_ he lies. And then, _I might be mistaken, they might not be following me at all._

Johnny showers slowly, kneads the knot in his shoulder and relishes in the steaming heat of the shower. He grabs a towel and wraps it around his waist, heading back into his room and to the window. 

There’s someone sitting under the awning of the restaurant opposite, watching him, but Johnny resists the urge to wave.

Today feels like a good day; the first in a while.

* * *

Mark wakes to bright sunshine, and the shadows on the wall are gone. It can’t last, he knows that, but he’s grateful for the break from them and from his growing unease about everything he stands for.

He dresses in black pants, black jacket, black barrel of a gun. No gloves, he’s never worn gloves. He’d only take them off and lose them or leave them on a table on a train. It seems too risky, and Mark takes enough risks as it is in his daily life.

His first risk of the day comes before nine, as he sips a coffee outside a small restaurant across the street from Johnny’s hotel. When Johnny appears at the window for a few seconds, Mark holds his breath. Johnny can’t see him, there’s no way he knows Mark is there, but there’s something about the way he hovers there at the window that has Mark simultaneously blushing and at the same time reaching for the back strap of his gun, just to check it’s there. 

A little after twelve, Mark watches from across the street as Johnny smiles at someone just out of view. His smile is beautiful, and his smile ruins everything tenfold. A smile is just teeth and lips. It’s a mask that everyone who lives with the shadows wears in public. Mark sees himself in it, in a way. Mark has never felt this way about a target, and it’s unsettling and enthralling at once.

Mark wants to get the job done, but he also wants to crumble into a heap and never remove himself from the sidewalk. Johnny keeps smiling, long after the person has walked away and Mark finds himself wondering what it’d be like to be the reason for such a magnificent sight.

Later, Mark orders a sandwich in a small cafe off a back-street away from the tourists that flock to the city this time of year. It's been raining and he's cold, and he lost Johnny four hours ago.

When he asks to pay, the server smiles. "Table seven paid for you before they left," she says, and points to a small, empty table near the door. "They left you a note."

Mark thanks her politely and then pockets the note, blood running cold as he steps out into the street and screams against his closed fist.

This is not how the plan was meant to go.

* * *

Johnny uses his neatest handwriting and keeps it simple:

_I’m intrigued. Hope to see you soon, J x_

He watches carefully as the man at table thirteen furrows his brow and puts his phone face down on the table beside his coffee cup. Johnny wonders how long he’s been killing for a living and whether it’s ripped him up from the inside out yet. He looks younger than Johnny is. Twenty four, twenty five maybe, Johnny guesses. 

He wonders if either of them will live to see thirty. 

Before he leaves, Johnny pays for them both, hands the server his note leaves the her a generous tip. He walks back to the hotel the long way, buys a flower from the lady outside the station and leaves it on a memorial statue surrounded by wreaths.

When Johnny gets back to his hotel, he texts a photo of the agent and sends it to Ten. “I need a name, but don’t ask any questions because I’m not answering them,” he texts. Ten will be mad, but he’ll do what Johnny asks, he always does. He’s the only person working at HQ that Johnny trusts anymore. 

Ten replies with a link to an encrypted document within seven minutes, and by the time he falls asleep, Johnny knows _everything_ about Mark Lee. 

He wakes up excited to meet him for real. Maybe he could be someone to care about.

Or maybe just someone to kill.

* * *

Johnny's file says he was behind the disappearance of a well-known diplomat the previous year. It says he's highly dangerous. It says he's regarded as one of the most competent and accomplished agents in his service, and that he’s extracted multiple secrets during his time in service.

Nowhere does it mention his damned smile and what it might do to an agent with boyish features, who is lost and touch-starved, and starting to wonder if he wants this at all. 

The shadows judge him when he wraps his hand around his cock and comes writhing against the white sheets of the hotel room bed. "Fuck off and mind your own business," he tells them, and then he turns his white-noise app on and stares at the ceiling until that leaves him too. 

Taeyong makes contact with him a week into the job. 

He leaves a message with reception, who call it up to Mark’s room in the evening, just as the sun is beginning it’s decent over the horizon.

"Mr Lee?" The man from reception confirms, when he calls up to Mark's room. "There is a message from your brother here for you. He says that your cousin has had to visit the hospital, but they think she should be out within five days."

"Thank you," Mark says. For a second he pretends it's true— that he has siblings and cousins and people who would care to leave him messages that aren't coded instructions.

"Would you like me to order you a bouquet of flowers?" The man asks him. "We can have it sent directly to her if you know which hospital she's staying at."

“No, that won’t be necessary,” Mark replies. His mouth is dry, his heart is racing. 

He has five days to kill Johnny Suh, and for the first time in his career, he isn’t sure how he’s going to get it done.

* * *

Johnny has broken into a hundred hotel rooms. Mark's is on the ninth floor of a four star, mid-range, place and it's unassuming; a suit in the closet, three folded shirts on the shelf inside. A laptop case and a pair of sneakers line the wall, and there's basketball shirts and a t-shirt in a bag to go to laundry.

It's the hotel room of any travelling businessman in any city.

Except— except, there's a photograph tucked into the pocket of the laptop case. Black and white, long-lens shot, taken when he was in Amsterdam last spring. Johnny's looking back over his shoulder, his hair is a little longer than it is now. He doesn't remember that day, but clearly he was being tracked. 

Johnny looks at the photo of himself and grins. The white corner of the photograph is curling at the edge, crumpled a little, like it's been clutched tightly on a dark night.

Maybe he’s just as excited to meet me, Johnny thinks, and then he sits in the quiet of someone else's private space, and waits patiently for Mark to return to his room. He doesn't know how long Mark will be, but that's okay. Johnny's spent the last ten years waiting for something, another few hours won't matter.

* * *

Mark goes out to pick up a burner phone Yuta tells him has been deposited in a trash can on the other side of the city. Mark wonders if he’s had it left so far away from his hotel room just to laugh at how damn far he has to walk to get it. 

When Mark gets back to his room, Johnny is there, sitting on his bed, holding his photograph, and he looks up as Mark enters. He smiles. _Fuck_. 

"Hey." Johnny's voice is warm and honey like, and it stirs something inside Mark's belly. He isn't sure how he expected Johnny to sound, but he likes this. Also, it's terrifying. 

Mark swallows. "How did you..?" It's not worth asking. He knows how Johnny got in. It's not difficult in their line of work to gain access to locked rooms. It’s one of the easiest parts of the job, to be honest. He changes course and settles for echoing the word, "Hey."

"I'm Johnny, but I guess you already know that." Johnny holds out the photograph with the faintest hint of a smirk, and Mark can't help but blush. He should have shredded that.

"Mark." He steps forward, and then back again. He has nowhere to go. "I'm Mark."

"You're the fifth this year," Johnny tells him. "The fifth man they've sent after me. And it’s been a couple of months since the last one, so I thought maybe it was over, but… Man, they _really_ want this secret kept under wraps."

Mark sits down on the edge of the bed next to him. The room is so quiet, so dark. Johnny's face is illuminated in the lights of the city outside. He looks like he's made of marble, but his body radiates warmth. 

Mark shrugs. "Isn't keeping them under wraps kind of the whole point of secrets?"

Johnny smiles. "I thought the point of secrets was to expose them, no?"

"I guess it depends which side you're on," Mark muses. “The good or the bad.”

It’s pointed, the way he says it, but he knows that they’re both on the good side, according to the people who employ them. The irony is in this: they’re both good, they’re both bad. They’re the same, and yet they’re opposite. Enemies.

Mark smiles to himself. He wonders what Yuta would do in this situation. He guesses Yuta wouldn’t be in this situation, or, if he was, there’d already be a fuck load of blood in the carpet. 

"You're the fifth this year, Mark," Johnny repeats. He's closer now, his hand on the bed almost touching Mark's. Their fingers barely an inch away from each other. Mark has the urge to touch him, to see if he's the skin and bone of the man underneath, or just the mask of the job. "And I haven't died yet."

"Yeah... I can see that." Mark coughs an awkward laugh into the twilight of the room. The shadows on the wall take on Taeyong’s form. Yuta’s form. The shadows whisper, _kill him now_.

"Table seven at noon tomorrow," Johnny says. He stands up so quickly that Mark almost goes to reach out and pull him back by the arm, but he doesn't. He doesn’t move at all. "At the cafe from yesterday. See you there, Mark Lee."

“See you there,” Mark replies, his mouth moving before his brain can engage.

As soon as Johnny leaves the room, Mark double locks the door and rests his forehead against it, closing his eyes. The familiar stirring in his lower belly taking over as he slides his hand down the front of his trousers. 

Mark feels like he's fallen into deep water, like he's lost his island, and now all he can do is cling to a jagged rock. He's lost his way, but he’s found something he wants, and he’s going to get it tomorrow.

* * *

Johnny can’t stop smiling, but probably not for the reasons he should be. He _should_ be smiling because he’s one step ahead of the enemy, because he made a move and it paid off, and he’s still alive.

Instead he’s smiling because his stomach is doing the kind of somersaults he hasn’t experienced since he was seventeen. Because Mark Lee is gorgeous, and he’s clever, and he’s just as intrigued by Johnny as Johnny is by him. He can tell from the way that Mark can hardly look him in the eye. From the way his breathing sped up when he saw Johnny there, in his room. From the way his eyes lingered on Johnny’s hands for longer than necessary.

Johnny noticed all of these things, and now he can’t stop smiling.

He wishes he could say that he has planned further ahead than just seeing Mark again, but he hasn’t. He’s spent so long waiting for someone to step into his life and surprise him, and now it’s happened, he’s excited. 

He buys a flower from the elderly lady outside of the station on his way back to his room, ignores the messages from his file handler about an update to his mission, and stops to buy cat food from a corner-store with a fake CCTV camera Johnny can spot a mile off, but any civilian would think is real. He wonders what it would be like to pull Mark into a darkened aisle and kiss him while no one is watching as much as he wonders if he could escape Mark without either of them getting killed. 

Probably not; not many of these jobs end without blood. That’s just the way it goes. 

* * *

Mark has done this before: played games with a target, let them befriend him, let them think his wide-eyed adoration is weakness. He's always got the job done, regardless.

This is different. This is damp palms and a shirt that feels like it's choking him. This feels like a fucking _date_. Maybe that’s what he wants it to be.

He might be out of his depth here. He might have lost his mind. Maybe he’s been drugged, he thinks, but he hasn’t— he knows he hasn’t, because he’s careful and he’s professional, and this isn’t drugs, it’s just lust. Lust and a complete fucking inability to see straight when he thinks about Johnny Suh. He's human after all.

Johnny orders them black coffee and biscotti, and they sit at table seven, and stare at each other. Mark thinks, _he's going to kill me_. Mark thinks, _I need to kill him_ , but the thoughts are abstract, like they’re something another Mark from another time would think. Not this one, not now.

Mark wants to know what it would feel like to be fucked by him. He wants to know this more badly than he wants to know how quickly he can get him off the scent of the secrets he’s been sent here to steal. Much more badly.

Mark has butterflies in his chest. He doesn’t need the black coffee that sits on the table in front of him, but he’ll drink it anyway, if only to keep up the pretence that this is just a casual meeting to him. 

"Why did you keep a photograph of me?" Johnny asks. He offers a sachet of sugar and Mark shakes his head. “Seems… Risky.”

"In case I forgot what you looked like," he says. The words stick to the roof of his mouth. He has a gun in the waist of his belt, but somehow he knows he isn't going to use it tonight. “To make sure I kill the right man.”

Johnny grins and stirs sugar into his coffee cup. "Good answer," he says. “But I don’t believe you.”

“That’s okay, I lie for a living,” Mark says. Johnny smiles at him, and he smiles back. “You don’t have to believe me, you just have to know I’m dangerous.”

Johnny leans back in his chair. His t-shirt pulls across his chest as he folds his arms. "Do you like cats?" he asks.

"What?"

"I have two cats in my hotel room." Johnny looks at him, unreadably easy in the way he sits. He doesn't look worried about the fact he's technically still scheduled to die. "Will they be a problem for you?"

Mark trips over his tongue. "For me? In your hotel room?" He's going red, he can feel it. His mask slips and he's vulnerable now in a way he never had been before.

This isn't work, anymore. This is personal, and Mark is lonely and he’s _curious_.

“Well, I’ve seen where you sleep.” Johnny smiles. “It only seems fair that you see my room.”

“Why are there cats?” Mark asks him. His coffee is going cold on the table. The people at table six are arguing over an open guidebook loudly. 

“I’m a sucker for lonely, lost things.” Johnny smiles. His eyes are sharp, but not mean. Mark is a good reader and Johnny doesn’t read like a trap. Still, he’s the enemy, and there’s only one way this is meant to end.

It's raining when they step outside. It’s always raining in this city.

Mark can’t find it in him to care.

* * *

Johnny is taking a man back to his hotel room. 

He’s taking a man whose job is to _kill_ him back to his hotel room.

Jaehyun would call him crazy, but that’s okay because maybe he is. He could fuck a thousand other people, people who don’t have a gun on their person and a professional knack for making people evaporate, but he doesn’t _want_ to fuck anyone else.

Not that it’s a given they’re going to fuck, of course. Johnny isn’t presumptuous. Maybe Mark will shoot him in the head the second they step inside the room. 

Maybe Mark should have already shot him, but he hasn’t. Mark has come to his room, and Mark keeps a photograph of him, worn at the edges. Mark has beautiful eyes and a wicked smile, and Johnny’s been waiting for someone like this without even realising it. 

They take the underpass back to Johnny’s hotel, two sets of footsteps echoing as they walk through the tunnel, dark and damp from the rain, and _empty_. This would be the ideal place to pull out a weapon and do away with an enemy, and in another timeline maybe Johnny would have Mark up against the wall of the tunnel, bleeding out quietly.

In this one, he’s just thinking about having Mark up against an elevator wall, tongue in his mouth. 

When they get to the hotel, though, they ride the elevator in silence. Mark doesn’t draw his weapon when they get to Johnny’s room. He doesn’t even step _inside_. He waits in the doorway, hair wet and jacket soaked through on the shoulders, until Johnny looks back.

“Come on,” he says. “The cats won’t bite.”

Mark smiles at the joke, and Johnny’s stomach turns over with excitement. He’s done this before, lured the enemy somewhere quiet, somewhere alone. He’s charmed them, turned on a perfect smile, given them a look that says, _I want to fuck you and you’re going to come with me_ , and he’s fucked a few of them, too. 

Johnny has found that people will give up even the most private of information when he’s got his cock in them. It helps get the job done.

Today, he’s not thinking about the job. He’s hardly thinking at all. He wants this so badly he can hardly fathom it himself. All that Johnny knows is that he’s still made of eyes, but they’re all focused on Mark Lee. 

Still, he doesn’t want to die, so he’ll stay on his guard, watch the door, listen out for the tell-tale clink of metal that means he’s three seconds from a bullet to the chest. 

“It’s nice to be out of the rain,” he says, as Mark steps into the room behind him, and closes the door. “Don’t you think?”

“Yeah.” Mark looks as dazed as Johnny feels. “Nice suite,” he says, even though it’s identical to a hundred other hotel rooms in a hundred other hotels. 

“Thanks.” Johnny heads towards the bathroom to grab some towels “I didn’t book it, obviously. I just go where I’m needed. But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

He steps back into the bedroom and holds out a towel. 

“What’s this for?” Mark just looks at it. Johnny would find it cute, but instead the blank look is kind of hot.

“It’s a towel.” Johnny laughs. “The rain, your hair— I mean, you don’t have to use it.”

“No. No, yeah that’s— thank you.” Mark drags the towel over his head. Johnny is glad that Mark seems to be as out of sorts as he is.

“So...” Johnny sits down and watches him carefully, every tiny move he makes. He’s _gorgeous_. “How long have I got left?”

* * *

Mark feels awkward as he dries off his wet hair. He’s not felt awkward in _years,_ not since he was first starting out and he had to shadow Taeyong, who was already skilled and confident in ways Mark has since grown. Mark wonders what he’s doing, and if there is anyone who can tell him. He looks at the white wall of the hotel room but there aren’t any shadows to give him a clue. 

Johnny asks how long he has and Mark just looks at him. "What?"

There’s a cat, short-haired and suspicious looking, curled up in the middle of the bed and Johnny reaches out to stroke behind its ears. “When do you have to report back to the head of service with the good news that I’m no longer a threat to the security of their secrets? When are you going to try to kill me?”

“Oh. Thursday,” Mark says. “I think, uh, four days.” 

Johnny just nods once to show he’s heard, and continues looking down at the sleepy cat. “You know that I can’t just let that happen, don’t you?”

Mark licks his lips. “I could just do it now,” he says. He’s not boasting, just stating a fact. He has a gun on him, Johnny must know this, and he’s _quick_. One swift movement and that would be it. “You wouldn’t have a choice.”

Johnny looks up at him and smiles. “Yeah, I bet you could. I’ve read up on you, you know. And I had heard your name before, but… Well, you’re not exactly how I imagined you’d be.”

“People say that.” Mark raises an eyebrow. He’s expecting the usual: a joke about his looks, about his youth, about his slighter-than-expected frame. 

“Yeah, I guess I didn’t think you’d be my type,” Johnny says. The smirk is back. It suits him. 

Mark stops breathing for a second. “Your— _oh_.” 

Johnny leans back on his hands and looks at him from under his eyelashes. “Why did you keep that photograph?” he asks again. “The real reason.”

Mark shrugs. “I guess you’re my type too,” he says.

It feels good to tell the truth. It’s been a while.

* * *

Johnny puts the wet towels in the tub ready for housekeeping to pick them up in the morning. He wonders if Mark will leave when he’s away from the room, but when he returns, Mark is still there.

Johnny wraps a hand around Mark’s wrist. It fits easily in his grip. “I’m bigger than you,” he says. He imagines gripping the bone tighter, snapping it clean in two. He could do it. He doesn't want to, though. “Stronger.”

Mark just looks at him.

Johnny runs his thumb over the pulse-point on the inside of Mark’s wrist. His pulse is racing. Johnny is glad he’s not the only one. “I could probably overpower you, if I wanted to,” he adds. “Hold you down, maybe with one hand…”

He’s thinking aloud, musing over the differences between them. He’s thinking about taking Mark’s wrists and holding them above his head, pushing him against the wall beside the door and holding him there, in place. He imagines the press of Mark’s hips against his own and just thinking about it sends shivers through his body and down to his cock. 

Mark’s other hand pulls back his jacket to remind Johnny that he’s packing literal heat. “And I could have a gun pressed against your temple in less time than it takes you to even blink,” he says. He sounds out of breath, but it’s still a threat. Johnny licks his lips.

“Mmm. But you don’t have a gun pressed to my head.” Johnny lets go of Mark’s wrist and his arm falls to his side again. “And I don’t intend to hurt you. Unless you want me to, that is.”

Mark makes a strangled noise and looks away.

Johnny watches him, the way the light from the window falls over his face. The tense flex of his fist. “Do you ever feel lonely?” he asks.

Mark looks back at him. “No,” he says, the word barely forms, but Johnny hears it. He also hears the uncertainty in Mark’s voice.

Johnny is sure that Mark is lying, but he doesn’t say so. “Come sit down,” he says. “But leave your pistol there in the top drawer and lock it. I don’t want the cats to get hurt.”

Mark hesitates for only a fraction of a second. He shrugs off his jacket and removes his holster. When he opens the drawer of the nightstand he looks back at Johnny with a renewed sense of amusement. “Gun hidden in a hollowed out bible? You’re very predictable”

“And you keep garrotte wire in a secret pocket in your jacket sleeve,” Johnny replies, enjoying the way that Mark blushes. “We’re cut from the same cloth, Mark Lee.”

When Mark sits down next to him on the bed, Johnny wonders what it would be like to be his friend. Except, he doesn’t have friends, and he likes people but he can’t trust a single soul. Mostly he wants to slide his palm over the expanse of Mark’s stomach and feel him underneath.

Mark clears this throat. He’s pink cheeked, but his gaze is steady now. Determined and unashamed. 

“Are you going to fuck me or should I get my pistol back out of the drawer and finish this job?” he asks.

In response, Johnny pulls Mark closer and kisses him. "Does that answer your question?" He asks, heartbeat in his throat, when he pulls away. Mark just nods. He's still looking at Johnny's lips, like he's disappointed he isn't still touching them, and it makes Johnny want to _devour_ him.

This is sure to end badly for one of them, he thinks, and then Mark leans in again and kisses him, hard and urgent, and Johnny can't think of anything but the heat in his belly and the press of Mark's body against his chest, and how he’s playing this game like he knows he’s going to win, when in reality he’s been bluffing the whole time.

* * *

Mark hasn’t felt nerves like this since he first tracked a foreign agent down to the back room of a nightclub and took him out, his silencer unnecessary because the music in the place was just so damn loud.

He'd been barely twenty years old at the time, and Taeyong had been there, and Seulgi, too, and afterwards when he'd returned home, he'd bought himself a Jaeger-LeCoultre watch— a flashy, show-off thing, that made him stand out a mile in his local coffee shop. He'd worn it a handful or times, and then he'd boxed it up and had paid to have it stored in the safety-deposit section of the bank, along with a couple of the passports he'd previously used, and a ring that his mother had given him when he was eighteen 'for his future wife'.

The five years that have passed since then have given Mark perspective. The watch has stayed in the vault under the bank, and so has the ring. He’s never needed them; the watch he wears now sends his location back to head office and rings would only make physical combat more messy. 

Johnny smells like patchouli and cigars, and his hand spans Mark's waist when he pulls him up close against him. The way his fingers dig into Mark's ribs does something to him that Mark's never been close to feeling before and he feels it in every single part of him. He wonders what that hand would feel like at his throat.

Johnny pulls Mark back up onto the bed, until he's flat on his back. The cat that was there before has disappeared, he realises, but then he sees her out of the corner of his eye, watching them from the windowsill. Judging, just like the shadows do. It's a pretty stupid position to be in, on his back with Johnny kissing him, Johnny's knee between his legs and his hand still there, a searing heat at Mark's waist even though his shirt. It's vulnerable, _he's_ vulnerable, and yet he's never felt so fucking alive. Not since the first time he completed a mission. Not since he bought the watch with his own money and thought, _this is crazy._

That Mark, rookie Mark, would laugh at him now, because buying a watch is nothing in comparison to letting someone who should be an enemy hold him down with an unmatched strength, and graze their teeth along his jaw agonisingly slowly.

"Fuck," he breathes. “You’re so—so hot...”

Johnny laughs against his neck, but Mark can’t find it in himself to even feel a little embarrassed about how obvious he’s being about being into him. "You like that?"

"Yeah." Mark closes his eyes and sinks into the feeling of Johnny’s mouth, his hands, the weight of his body against him. “But…”

“But?” Johnny actually pulls back, and his concern for Mark’s consent reminds him that they’re human after all, the two of them. They’re not weapons, they’re people, and sometimes people can be _good_.

“But we have too many clothes on.” He smiles, and Johnny’s frown dissipates, replaced by the sort of grin the devil might wear to greet you. 

“I can see to that,” Johnny promises, making short work of the buttons on Mark’s shirt, before pulling his own off over his head in one swift movement. Their pants are next, and everything else, and then Johnny is checking him out— there’s no other way to describe it. He takes his time, licks his lips, drags his palm down over Mark’s stomach and between his legs, and Mark is losing his _mind_. He hasn’t been touched like this in so long, and even then it wasn’t like this. No one has ever looked like they’re _savouring_ him, and it’s such a fucking compliment, and so damn hot, that he’s already achingly hard when Johnny wraps his fingers firm around Mark’s cock and leans in to kiss him again.

Mark has never felt so in control of such a vulnerable situation, and yet he knows he could be minutes away from death if Johnny wanted to end things here. Then again, he could probably kill Johnny just a quick. They’re a good match, he thinks, smiling into the kiss as Johnny strokes him in lazy twists of his wrist. It’s as if they have all of the time in the world, except time is something that definitely is not on their side.

Mark gets Johnny onto his back and crawls down between his legs. “You gonna put that pretty mouth on me?” Johnny asks through red, wet lips. “I wanna see you take it all.”

He bares his teeth, wolf-like, and Mark just gives him doe-eyes, the ones that distract even the most alert of agents. Then he turns his head and bites down on Johnny’s inner thigh, right at the top where the skin is most tender. 

Johnny moans, and then breaks off in a shaky laugh Mark wonders if he’s nervous, or maybe just completely and utterly wrecked. “Point taken. You’re an animal.”

Mark’s heart races, he’s on fire, burning up inside. He is an animal: he’s instinct and power, and the relentless pursuit of prey, and he feels more awake inside than he’s felt in years right now. “I’m dangerous,” Mark tells him, and Johnny laughs again. Wrecked, Mark thinks. Johnny looks down at him and his eyes are pools of black liquid, lust-filled. It would be easy to grab his gun from the drawer and press it to Johnny’s temple.

“Show me how dangerous you are,” Johnny says, and Mark obliges— licks a thick stripe up along the vein on the underside of his cock. It’s thick, heavy against his tongue, and the heat of it surprises him. He hasn’t been this close to another person in so long, he’d forgotten how hot another body can be when he’s not watching them from long range, in the shadows, waiting to end their life. Mark takes in as much of Johnny as he can, all the way to the back of his throat, and above him Johnny is electric. Mark could get off on the feeling of being so full alone, but he isn't going to. He's going to take his time. 

He should have shot Johnny dead hours ago, but that’s okay. He'll get it done, later.

* * *

The adrenaline pumping through his body has Johnny seeing white light. 

He fists his hand into Mark’s hair, and it’s short but he can get a good grip. Mark makes a noise in the back of his throat as he bobs his head, eager and wet mouthed around Johnny’s cock, and Johnny has to blink back tears that prick up in the corner of his eyes unexpectedly. He has never, _ever_ cried during sex, and it’s not like he’s crying now, not really, but then, it’s not normally this _charged_ , like every movement is a thousand times magnified, crisper, clearer than any moment in his life upto this point.

He thinks about the endless days that have led up to this, about sleeping with a gun in his hand and secrets on his tongue. He thinks about all of the times he’s been debriefed after a successful mission, and the ground-hog day style feeling of getting on a plane with a passport that lies about who he is and when he was born. He thinks about Mark’s slim wrists and the cinch of his waist and about how quick he is, how clever and how much he wants Mark to remember him, even if no one else will.

It doesn’t matter what his peers think or what his enemies think of him, it never has and never will. His legacy is in his kills. It doesn’t matter what Mark thinks either, but Johnny wants to make an impression on him anyway. 

“I’m gonna come,” he warns, and Mark just swallows him down again, eyes closed, eyelashes fanned out over his cheeks, until Johnny can feel the back of Mark’s throat against him, and he comes with a string of curse words that his mom would scold him for if she knew he was using. She’d be angier about that than the fact he kills for a living, probably, not that she can ever know that.

Mark pulls off him with a smile like a fox and spit on his chin, and says, “That was easy.” 

Johnny pulls him back up the bed, flips them over and bites at his shoulder. “You’re something else, Mark Lee,” he breathes against the pink skin there, and Mark hums in response. “Like no one I’ve met.”

“Am I? Or are we actually the same?” Mark asks him. His eyes are dark, glazed over, and his mouth is slack. Johnny marvels at the view. 

“I think our governments would disagree.” Johnny smiles, idly wrapping his fingers around Mark’s wirst, feeling his pulse, his bone beneath the skin. “I think they’d say one of us is doing good and the other is a liability.”

“We’re both good, and we’re both a liability.” Mark twists his wrist out of Johnny’s grip and winds their fingers together until they’re holding hands. “We’re complicated people.”

Johnny knows they’re not really people at all, but he doesn’t want to think about that right now. He looks at their intertwined fingers and presses a kiss to Mark’s temple. Asks, “Are you going to kill me?”

Mark pauses. “I don’t know.”

Johnny lets go of his hand, slides his hand up around Mark’s neck instead. He presses gently at the base of Mark’s throat, and Mark swallows, eyes never leaving his. “Do you think it’s a coincidence? That they sent you to me? Did they know I’d be… You’d get under my skin like this? That I’d want to be in you?”

“I don’t know,” Mark answers again. His eyes flutter closed, and then open slowly. Johnny leans down and kisses him, his hand still there, at Mark’s throat. Mark kisses him hungrily, leaning up into the kiss, straining against Johnny’s grip. He makes a noise that goes straight to the pit of Johnny’s belly, one that sounds like he’s dying with pleasure. “I don’t know,” he repeats against Johnny’s lips. “I don’t know.”

Mark opens his mouth then, deepens the kiss, slides his tongue into Johnny’s mouth and moans against it, dreamily. Johnny has never felt like this, so present in the moment. Kissing Mark feels like a secret he's never known he needed access to, and Johnny's so hard, so worked up, so into this it _hurts_.

He wonders, for the first time in years, what it would be like to live past thirty.

* * *

Mark doesn’t mean to stay, he doesn’t mean to linger in Johnny’s room long enough for them to go a second round, but he doesn’t exactly try to leave, either. He stays, watches as Johnny gets up and orders room service naked. He has a tattoo, bigger than Mark was expecting, that runs down over his back, and Mark spends time running his fingers over it while Johnny flicks through TV channels and settled on white-noise.

When he finally does leave— with four messages from the people waiting on results later waiti— he goes back to his own hotel and ordered room service, exhausted and still a little dazed. The shadows on the wall are judging him, but the glow from the TV blurs them enough to ignore.

He sleeps for a few hours, he showers, he checks in to the server to show he’s alive, and then he falls asleep again, dreams of the cold, hard kiss of the barrel of a gun, and then of warm, living kisses like pure electricity, that shock him into waking up. When he looks at his watch, it’s four thirty and it’s still pitch black out.

Mark tries to slip it into the conversation naturally. “Do we have any intel on Johnny’s personal life?” he asks Yuta, who called him on a blocked number to tell him to update his location devices, four time zones over and already busy at his desk. 

“Family? Parents?” Yuta says. “They’re teachers, I think. A happy, regular family. They think he’s in sales.”

“Not his family. His— do we have anything on his, uh, private life?” Mark knows this doesn’t sound natural. It sounds like he’s too involved, which he is. “Has he ever dated anyone for a long period of time?”

“Why do you need to know who the target fucks?” Yuta asks. He sounds suspicious. “You don’t need any more info, you’ve already tracked him to his hotel. You just need to execute this thing.”

Mark swallows the lump in his throat. He can hear the disapproving murmur of the shadows on the ceiling. “I’m just….”

“Three days to go. Joy is waiting for you to check in, and she wants to be able to sign this one off. We all do.”

“I’m working on it.” Mark’s fingers ghost over the trail of bruises that Johnny has left across his neck, his collarbone. He runs his fingertips over the bite mark on his shoulder. “I’ll get it done,” he promises, but he’s really only got himself to convince.

There’s a pause on the line, and then Yuta says, “I’m only saying this because I care, but you need to clear your head and fast.” He sounds frustrated. Mark feels bad. “None of us need another unmarked gravestone to visit, Mark. Believe me, I don’t need that. This fucking desk job is bad enough without _that_.”

“That’s not going to happen, I’m not— I’m not going to die.” Mark blinks as the shadows on his hotel-room wall dance around him accusingly, murmuring their disparagement. 

Yuta huffs out a breath. “You have seventy two hours,” he reminds Mark, and then he ends the call. 

* * *

Johnny lets the cats free in the hotel corridor, and waits to hear the shrieks of confusion from other guests. They’re better out there— safer, even. If Mark’s here for him, there must be other agents out there, too. Even if they’re not working directly together, there’ll be someone watching, waiting to step in where they’re needed. That’s how this whole charade usually goes.

He wouldn’t want the cats to get hurt, and he guesses they don’t want to hang out in his room when he’s getting off to the thought of Mark’s gag-reflex.

Mark leaves after they fuck, takes his gun and his wire with him, shirt tucked back into his trousers. Johnny doesn’t expect him to stay and cuddle, neither of them have the capability for that. Johnny can’t sleep with someone in the bed, only with his gun. He guesses Mark is probably the same— this job has a knack of moulding everyone in it into a carbon-copy of repressed emotion and insomnia, quick reactions and general distrust.

Johnny wonders if he’s going to die this week, or if Mark might die instead. Or maybe both of them will, he thinks. It would certainly make a good tragic movie ending: two gunshots, two bodies, and a fuck ton of paperwork for both of their teams to have to complete. 

Maybe that would be unfair of them— Johnny knows that Jungwoo fucking hates the paperwork involved in all of this, and he’d made it pretty clear before Johnny set out to infiltrate and get rid of the corrupt delagate that now lies in the bottom of the river across town, his secrets ready to be released, that Johnny was _not_ to do anything that would make his job more difficult.

Jungwoo would _not_ be happy to know what’s gone on in this room. Plus, the housekeeping staff here seem really nice and friendly, and Johnny would hate for them to have to find a body or two.

It would be better, he decides, for there to be no body for anyone to find, if that was an option. 

(Johnny knows it is not.)

* * *

Mark wanders down through the old side of the city, underneath the bridges where the canal runs and past a row of nightclubs. He stares at his shadow, long and still under a streetlamp and wonders when his mask slipped so far from his eyes that he was even contemplating returning to Johnny’s hotel with no intention of ending him. 

He keeps walking until daylight meets him in grey clouds, heavy with rain, and then he eats breakfast at a tiny place next to the river, logs in and lies to Joy about why he needs more time to complete the job. Then he goes back to Johnny, where he falls straight back into bed.

Johnny runs his fingers over the stubble on Mark’s jaw and slips two of them into Mark’s mouth. He sucks on them, tongue lapping at them, and then grins and grazes the skin with his teeth. 

“Playing dirty?” Johnny asks, eyebrow raised, and Mark sucks on the fingers again, until Johnny pulls them out of his mouth and takes one of Mark’s nipples between his wet fingers, squeezing until Mark has to bite down on the inside of his cheek to stop himself from begging Johnny to stop. He doesn’t want to stop, he never wants to stop. He wants Johnny's hands on him forever. 

Mark notices the cats are gone, and he wonders what the story there is, but he doesn’t ask. He has two and a half days to kill Johnny, or come up with an excuse not to, and he hasn’t got an excuse that Joy would accept. “I’ve started fucking the target and I really don’t want to stop,” isn’t a valid reason to not go home with another kill under his belt, he knows that, and a few years ago when he was raw energy and blanketed emotions, he would have scoffed at the thought of this scenario. 

He’s never been in love, so he doesn’t know what it feels like, but even so Mark knows it feels nothing like this: like standing on the edge of a cliff and contemplating pushing someone else off before you fall. Still, he could imagine falling in love with Johnny, if things were different. _Very_ different. 

Johnny turns him over easily, smooths a palm along his back and then grabs a fistful of his ass. “You’re so pliant,” Johnny muses. “You like being manhandled, don’t you?”

Mark just breathes into the feather pillow and waits for Johnny to slide his fingers over the curve of his ass. This is the third time they’ve fucked in less than thirty six hours, and yet it feels like nothing has even happened yet; like this is the edge of ecstasy, something brand new. 

Mark hears the pop of a bottle-cap, but even the warning doesn’t stop him from squirming when Johnny drips the lube between his bare cheeks and spreads it with the pads of his fingers, slow and deliberate in the way he takes his time with it.

It’s excruciating, the wait. The anticipation is like nothing Mark has felt in a long time, and his whole life is one journey of trepidation, so that’s saying something. “Come on,” Mark pleads. “Do it.”

Johnny chuckles softly. “I’m enjoying this,” he says. “Taking my time, making you wait.”

“We don’t have time.” Mark grits his teeth, his cock hard against his stomach, pressed against the bed. “Please—”

Johnny works his finger inside, and then another, works them in and out slowly, and Mark groans in relief as he’s fucked into, Johnny curling his fingers just-so inside, before slipping them back out again, over and over, and it’s more like bliss with every thrust.

Mark wishes this didn’t have to end. Maybe, he thinks, it doesn’t have to.

* * *

Johnny rolls the condom over his cock and lines himself up with Mark’s entrance. Mark looks back at him over his shoulder, wide eyed and hungry, and says, “Harder, this time.”

“Last time wasn’t to your liking?” Eyebrow raised, Johnny challenges him.

Mark just grins. “I didn’t say that. I just—uh— it's a request, is all.” He’s pink cheeked, but that’s probably not from shyness. They’ve been in bed for almost an hour already, kissing and sucking each other off lazily. Mark is glad he ate before he came over because he doesn't imagine they're going to stop for a while. 

“Request accepted.” Johnny puts one hand firmly on Mark’s hip and runs the other up to the top of Mark’s spine, where he presses to tell Mark to arch his ass up a little. Mark makes a low, breathy, sound as Johnny pushes into him. “But only because I want it too,” he adds. 

When he’s fucking Mark, hips snapping against his skin, the perspiration on the back of his neck a warm reminder of what it’s like to live for the moment and not the end of a job, Johnny feels things he has ignored for years. Anger, he rarely feels anger when there isn’t a point. Hasn’t since Jaehyun disappeared. He feels anger now, now that he’s found something he wants to do over and over, and it has an expiry date. And joy, genuine joy, the sort that hits you in the chest at the sight of a smile or the whisper of a name. He feels that here, too.

“Johnny,” Mark moans underneath him, back arched now as Johnny bends over him, keeps him close as he fucks into him. “Oh— yeah, keep…” 

“I won’t stop,” he promises, trying to angle himself in deeper, further. He wants to feel Mark tighter around him than he’s ever felt anyone, wants to feel every vibration through Mark’s body. Mark says they’re the same and maybe they are, at least now, right now, Johnny kissing the salt at the back of Mark’s neck, eyes closed and desperate to keep going for as long as he can without coming.

Every time they come, it’s a little closer to the end of this— this what, Johnny wonders. Fantasy? Vacation from life? Denial about why they’re really here? Johnny pulls Mark’s body up against his chest, until he’s holding him up against him, controlling everything, and Mark is letting him, letting go as his cock slaps against his stomach every time Johnny thrusts into him. 

Mark makes a noise like a whimper and Johnny bares teeth against Mark’s shoulder. Mark stills for a second, waiting, and it makes him feel breathless. “Leave a bruise,” Mark tells him. “Make it hurt.”

Johnny grins against his skin, keeps one arm around Mark’s slim, warm, body to hold him up and takes Mark’s cock in the other hand, squeezing tightly and pumping him in time with the stutter of his hips. He bites down on Mark’s shoulder as he works him over, and listens to the melody of moans that Mark breathes out as he does, until he comes inside of Mark, and then Mark comes too, body like a rag doll, shaken up and pliant. 

“You’re so good,” he mumbles. “So good.” 

They fall onto the bed, Mark rolling into his back and running a hand through his hair. Johnny would like the image tattooed behind his eyes.

“Fuck, my legs are still shaking,” Mark says, voice low, and without even thinking Johnny pulls him closer and presses a soft kiss to his head. 

* * *

Mark hasn’t fallen asleep with another person in years, but he wakes up in Johnny’s arms, the afternoon sun pouring into their room from the city sky outside. Johnny stirs awake next to him and startles, blinking rapidly and mumbling. “Oh,” he says, “It’s you.”

Mark wonders when he stopped being a threat, or if he really has. After all, he still has a gun and he still has a time limit. 

They don’t get out of bed until afternoon, and when they do Mark has a string of messages he has to code in to read. “Uh, I just need…” He points to the bathroom, pulling on his underwear and picking up his phone. 

He expects messages from Yuta, but instead he sees the tell-tale _TY_ identifier flash up, and his heart stops a beat. 

_In the lobby, 3 mins._ The message reads. It doesn’t say which lobby, or where, but it doesn’t need to. Taeyong has never needed to say much to get a job done.

Johnny is frowning at his own phone, when Mark leaves the bathroom. “Everything okay?”

“Hmm? Yeah, my side are just asking about things. About you.”

“Me? What about me?” A sharp jolt of panic hits him. 

“If you’ve found me. If you’re dead yet.” Johnny says it as if it’s a given; but then if he’s already had four agents on his heel this year, it probably should be. “If I’ve got the info I need from the Choi-Johnson group to feed back to my side. All the usual questions. None of which I have answers for.”

“What do they say about me?” Mark asks. He finds his T-shirt beside the bed and pulls it back on. “Your side, your government? What do they think of me?”

“The file my handler has on you says you’re meticulous, quick, unfeeling...” Johnny looks at him, _into_ him. “I don’t think you’re unfeeling.”

“No,” Mark agrees. “But neither are you.”

“I guess not.” Johnny says it as if he’s surprised that he agrees, and it makes Mark feel kind of sad—what sort of life makes a man forget he’s human, if not a hard one. 

Mark understands it, and he wants to reach out and take Johnny’s hand but instead he flashes a grin. “I certainly felt you inside me just an hour or two ago…” 

Johnny smiles, and Mark is pleased to see that it reaches his eyes. “Don’t you want to come back to bed? It’s still warm.”

“I do,” Mark admits. “But I have to see to something. I’ll come back, I promise.”

Both of them know that neither are in a position to make any promises at all, so Johnny doesn’t question where he’s going, just watches as Mark finds his boots and sits down on the edge of the bed to tie them. “If it comes to it, Mark, how do you want to die?” Johnny asks. 

“It won’t come to that.” Mark looks back before he leaves the room. “Why? How do you want to go?”

“It won’t come to that either,” Johnny says. They stare at each other for a moment. “I have never intended to die on the job and I still don’t.”

“That makes two of us.” Mark’s mouth is dry. What are they saying? Are they warning each other? Begging each other? Do these words mean anything at all, Mark wonders. 

He takes the elevator down to the lobby and when he sees Taeyong sitting near the bar sipping a cup of coffee, he wishes he’d stayed in bed.

* * *

Ten calls Johnny, and he’s _pissed_. “You are a fucking idiot. They sent you a little twinky thing and you’ve all but abandoned your duty? What is _wrong_ with you? Actually, don’t answer that. I don’t have time to discuss all that, I just want you to tell me that this isn’t what it sounds like.”

“What does it sound like?” Johnny stretches out in the empty bed. Mark’s side is still warm. Maybe he shouldn’t have sent a photo of him sleeping to his file handler, but he was feeling reckless, fucked out and on the edge of asking a man he just met to marry him or something.

“Like you’ve lost your mind.” Ten lowers his voice; he must be hidden away in the bathroom or in a back corridor of the head quarters. Or maybe he’s at home, he works from home sometimes, where he has four cats and a husband who clearly knows who he works for but pretends not to. Ten should not be judging him, Johnny thinks. But he’s glad that someone cares.

“Maybe I have.” Johnny laughs. “But I’m happy, Ten. For the first time in my life, I feel _happy_. I’m not watching the door, I’m just… feeling.”

“Is the plan to kill him? To apprehend him and escape?” Ten sighs. “Is the plan to die? Jungwoo will be pissed at that but… At least keep me in the loop, I’m your case handler.” He says it like someone else would say brother, or best friend, or _family_. He’s as close as Johnny has these days.

“I fell asleep holding him this morning,” Johnny says. “Crazy, right?”

“Yes, Johnny, you _are_ crazy.” Ten mutters, “And a pain in the ass.”

Johnny rolls over onto his side and looks at the empty pillow beside him. Imagines it’s his bed at home and that Mark sleeps in it every night. He smiles at the thought. “Don’t worry, I won’t give Jungwoo any unnecessary paperwork to complete, I know he hates the Deceased Agent stuff.”

“Then _hurry up,_ get rid of this guy so you can go and get on with finding out why his president is so indebted to the Choi-Johnson group. There are concerns about how long this job is taking you, and I’m running out of ways to explain why you’ve not interacted with any of the key players in this mission yet. I’m not going to come up with a reason as to why it seems like the guy they’ve sent to kill you has _seduced_ you.”

“You’re good at lying, you’ll manage to come up with something.”

“Thanks,” Ten mutters. He knows Johnny means that as a compliment. “Just get rid of the counter-op agent and get out of there.”

Johnny pauses. “And if I don’t get rid of him?”

“If you don’t, someone else will do it for you. Remember that, and that goes for his side too. There’s always a back-up, John. There’s always someone else willing to pull the trigger.” He sighs, and then, a muffled noise as he moves the phone from his mouth and shouts, “Coming, honey! Just grabbing my wallet.”

He’s at home, then, with the husband and the pets and the expensive sofa he is always moaning about paying off a credit card for. Johnny laughs. “Where are the two of you going?”

“Brunch. New pancake house downtown.” Ten huffs out a breath. “Finish the job, Johnny. End this.”

“Enjoy your food,” Johnny says, just as Ten ends the call. He’s only jealous, really. He’ll never have that life. 

He might not have any life, soon— after all, there is only one way this job is meant to end and it’s with blood. The only question remaining is whose will it be. 

* * *

Taeyong barely raises one perfect eyebrow. “I ordered you a green tea,” he says, a vision of serenity. His leather gloves are folded neatly on the table. 

Mark doesn’t touch the cup, just starts talking. “I’m infiltrating his circle. Staking out his room, checking on his interactions. It’s all standard procedure.” 

“Really?” Taeyong doesn’t look even remotely convinced. Mark’s heart sinks even further.

“I’ve been— I’ve got a room on the same floor, I’ve tapped his room phone and I’ve been listening in to when he’s back, who he’s with—“

“No, Mark. _I’ve_ got a room on the same floor.” Taeyong leans across the table, his hair falling into his face. “I’m doing your job right now, while you’re… I don’t even want to know. It doesn’t seem like you’re trying to _end_ him.”

Mark’s throat constricts. “Taeyong, I’m—“

“I took your tracker the first time you left your room to see him. I’m you, as far as the people in charge are aware, I’m having to be _you_ because you’re sloppy. You’re— you’re a _liability_ Mark. If Joy knew about this…” His eyes widen at the thought. “The enemy would _not_ be who you’d need to worry about.”

“She won’t know. This is… it's part of the plan, I promise.” Mark leans across the table, voice quiet but heart racing. He hopes Taeyong can’t see through him, but he knows he probably can. Taeyong is his senior, Taeyong has seen it all. “I know what I’m doing.”

Taeyong very clearly doesn’t believe him, but he doesn’t voice his disbelief, not verbally anyway, and Mark will be forever grateful. “Tell me he’ll be dead within forty eight hours.”

Mark’s mouth is dry. Still, he doesn’t reach for the tea. “He’ll be dead,” Mark says. “I’ll kill him.”

Taeyong leaves before Mark can remember how to breathe again. 

When he gets back to Johnny’s room, Johnny is still in bed. Mark pulls his T-shirt back over his head and lets Johnny pull him back under the sheets. Johnny doesn’t ask him where he’s been or who he’s spoken to; he doesn’t have to. 

They both know their roles here, even if neither of them want to admit it aloud. So, instead of speaking, they put their mouths to other uses. 

It’s dark before they come up for air again, exhausted but satisfied. Mark stretches out his limbs and relishes in the sweet feeling of the burn in them. “Maybe we should go out,” he suggests. He feels dizzy, like he’s falling from a great height. He feels like this is all fake, or maybe this is real and everything else is a lie. “Get something to eat?”

“On a date?” Johnny’s voice is light and when Mark looks at him he’s smirking again. Mark ignores the way his heart flutters at the thought. 

“Aren’t you hungry? There’s meant to be a couple of good places to eat around here.” He grabs his phone from the nightstand. “I got sent some recommendations as well as my orders from base.”

“You got… Your case handler sends you restaurant recommendations?” Johnny laughs. Maybe everyone’s file handler becomes their closest friend after a while, he thinks. 

“He gets bored,” Mark explains. “Used to be one of us, but something happened out on the field. I think he misses it.”

“Ah.” Johnny nods in understanding. “I get that. It’s—I bet it’s hard to go back to civilian life. Does he know you’re considering taking your target out to dinner?”

“I have no idea what anyone knows, not anymore.” Mark puts his phone away. This isn’t strictly true, Taeyong seemed to know pretty much everything, which Mark feels uneasy about. He’s barely sure their encounter even happened, it was over so quickly. Still, at least he seems to have Mark’s back. Mark is grateful for that. 

Johnny smiles. “Let’s stay in the room and order something,” he says, fingers trailing shapes on Mark’s bare shoulder. “Anyone could be out there, it could be dangerous.”

“Dangerous for you or for me?” Mark asks him, leaning up for a kiss. 

“I don’t know.” Johnny pulls away and sets Mark with an unreadable stare. “You tell me.”

That night, Mark goes back to his hotel to log in and lie his way through an update and finds Taeyong is already there. “Is he dead yet?” Taeyong asks. He has his gloves on, his pistol on the bed next to him. He looks deadly. He looks like he’s ready to complete a mission, like Mark should be.

Mark shakes his head. “I need some more time.”

“You don’t _have_ time,” Taeyong tells him. He’s dyed his hair, maybe ready for another job. Maybe just because he wanted to. Mark doesn’t mention it. 

“Friday at six, that’s my deadline, isn’t it?” He gets out his laptop and sets it up on the desk. “I have time. It’ll be _fine_ , you can go.”

Taeyong doesn’t stand up. “Mark, I respect you and your work ethic, always have. That’s why I recommended you to lead field-jobs so young. That’s why I’m here, back-up, while you take charge and not the other way round.” Mark logs into the system and pretends to be busy, but he’s listening. “I vouch for you because you’re an incredible talent. I don’t want… Please, don’t waste that.”

“I still have time,” Mark says, still facing the laptop screen. He feels guilty, because Taeyong has always had his back and here he is, making life difficult for him. “And I have a plan. You can go.”

Taeyong shuts the door behind him carefully, only the very last creak of the lock making any sound at all.

Mark can't sleep, and even the white-noise app doesn't help. He finally falls asleep as the sun is rising, and then he's angry when he wakes up and it's almost midday, because he's wasted time. 

He has just over a day to finish this job, and all he wants to do is lay in Johnny Suh's arms.

* * *

Johnny goes out, pays for coffee for the three people in line behind him, walks in the rain for a while. He messages Ten to claim everything is still under control, even though he knows Ten doesn't believe him.

When Mark turns up at his hotel, with tired eyes, he says, “We’re being monitored. Not literally, not right now, I don’t think. But another member of my team is here. He knows that I’m— that we’re…" He pauses. "I just thought you should know."

"That we're what?" Johnny asks. He isn't sure he wants to know.

Mark sighs. "He has his suspicions that my heart isn’t in the job this time.”

“I told my handler I’m the happiest I’ve ever been,” Johnny admits. “Right now, with you.”

“You did?” He sounds surprised, like he's never made anyone happy before. It makes Johnny want to hold him forever, does things to him he never thought he'd understand. Johnny had never been interested in settling down himself. He'd cared about his friends finding love, cared about strangers being happy. But he'd never expected to crave it for his own. He does, now, and it makes him laugh.

Now it's too late.

Later, Johnny holds Mark close, drowsy and warm. He imagines that they look the sort of couple that Johnny sees in places he doesn’t think he belongs. The sort that Ten plays at being with his husband when he isn’t in the office tracking the whereabouts of spies for a living, Johnny thinks.

No, even _more_ normal than them—the sort of person who doesn;t even realise this world exists around them, innocent and naive and trusting. Like he could have been, if he hadn’t signed his soul away to the operation when he was young and dumb and too excited at the prospect of driving fast cars and playing with technology to see that he was giving up all of the agency he would now never have over his life.

He imagines, for the first time, that sort of domesticity— waiting in line for a table at the local brunch spot, buying groceries, counting change— but there is still a part of him that can’t imagine it. It feels foreign. He only knows the smell after discharging a weapon, the quick spike of fear as a job starts to slip away, and the pleasure of pulling it back and logging in to tell Donghyuck of his mission success. 

“Shower with me?” Johnny asks. He shifts back a little to see Mark's face more clearly.

“I get claustrophobic.” Mark looks at him, unreadable, and Johnny thinks that this is what is what he is so intrigued by: the spaces in between the lines he can read. Most people are transparent, and transparency is too easy.

“Really?”

“No.” Mark smiles. He looks up at the ceiling. “But I can't. I have to reply to some messages from… Well, you know.”

"I know. I have some too." Johnny gets up and goes to turn on the shower. “I’ll try to work on a way to stop time while I shower because I’m meant to get on a plane out of here, armed with information I haven’t bothered finding, in twenty four hours. Which I’m guessing means that you have, what, twenty... three hours to kill me?”

He watches as Mark pulls his T-shirt back over his head and smooths down the creased material. "Or is it less than that?"

Mark rubs at the back of his neck. "Maybe a little less. Six PM tomorrow is the deadline."

Johnny sits up and gestures for Mark to come back over to the bed. He kisses him, languid and slow as if they have time that they don’t. "What happens if the deadline passes?”

“I have to finish my mission.” Mark closes his eyes, keeps them closed even after they break their next kiss. Johnny can feel how tense he is. “I don’t have a choice.”

Johnny holds Mark's chin in his hand and presses one last kiss to the side of his mouth. “Then I have no choice but to make sure I get on that plane before you kill me,” he says, and then he lets go of Mark and climbs out of bed.

"Leave the bathroom door open," Mark tells him.

"So you can keep an eye on me?" Johnny asks. He’s only half joking. Maybe he should be keeping an eye on Mark too, he thinks. 

Mark gives him a half-smile. "No. So I can see you naked while I send these damn messages." He walks around the bed to open the drawer where they've come to lock their weapons, phones, trackers— everything that makes them who they are— while they're together, and takes out his phone, entering his passcode, then using the face-scanner, and typing another code in afterwards.

"I'll put on a show for you." Johnny promises him, trying to keep a straight face, but failing. This is what he's been missing all of this time, he realises. _This_ is living, even if he might only have a day of it left.

* * *

Mark's messages from Yuta are fraught and sent within the space of one two minute period. _Taeyong has your tracker? Are you dead? What are you doing? If you don't come back from this I'll be pissed. Taeil will be pissed._

He calls Yuta's number. "Taeyong told you about taking my tracker?"

Yuta huffs. "He's worried about you. He was debating telling Joy but I talked him out of it. He thinks you've lost your mind. "

"It's under control." Mark can't even muster the energy to make it sound convincing. Nothing has been under control since Mark opened that note from Johnny in the cafe. Nothing has been under control since Johnny showed up at his hotel, invited him for coffee and then took him back to his room. "Taeil won't need to complete any End of Life paperwork."

Yuta sighs. "Taeil wouldn't be bothered about the paperwork, if he knew the risks you were taking... He'd just want you back here, alive."

"That's what I want, too. But..." Mark trails off. Out of the corner of his eye he can see a shadow on the wall, but he blocks it out. He hasn't got time for being judged by the dead as well as by the living. Not when he only has seventeen hours until he's got to end this.

"I hope he's worth all of this," Yuta says. "He'll have to be the fuck of the damn _millennium_ to be worth it, Mark."

Mark laughs, even though he knows Yuta isn't joking. "I'll log in again later with an update," he promises, and Yuta lets him end the call with only a small amount of grumbling.

Mark sits on the bed and watches Johnny's reflection in the bathroom mirror, his back to it as he soaps up shampoo in his hair. He watches the tattoo that starts on his shoulder and snakes down over his back and around to his left ribs. Mark has traced it with his fingers, but he hasn't properly _looked_ at it yet. It's beautiful, haunting, intricate and it suits what he knows about Johnny Suh. Fine lined roses, swirling and hypnotising. Mark wonders how many people have seen it and it makes him feel awfully jealous.

Mark's heart beats heavy in his chest. He locks his phone away in the top drawer and strips off, and then he heads into the bathroom.

“Hey," he says, and Johnny turns around. "Fuck me?”

“Yes.” Johnny grins, and Mark steps into the shower beside him, under the hot flow of the waterfall shower above them. Johnny is on him as soon as Mark is underneath, and Mark relishes in it— the firmness of Johnny's touch, the direct way that he takes Mark's cock in his hand and thumbs at the head. "This is all I want," he murmurs. "You."

"Same." Mark breathes, his shoulder-blades hitting cold tiles as Johnny pushes him up against the wall and licks into his mouth greedily. 

The water is warm, and it makes the slide of their bodies against each other easy. Mark is already hard, his cock pushed up against the hard plane of Johnny's stomach as Johnny holds him in place pinned back against the wall as he stands on his tiptoes, barely touching the floor. Johnny rolls Mark's bottom lip between his teeth and it makes Mark gasp. He knows that physically he'll always be vulnerable with Johnny, that Johnny is stronger than him, bigger than him, but physicality is only half of it, and Mark knows that he could have Johnny flat on his back on the bathroom floor in a heartbeat. He doesn't want that, though.

"Fuck me," he says, Johnny's mouth on his neck. "Here, now."

Johnny lifts his head, looks Mark straight in the eyes. "Are you sure you're ready?" he asks, and Mark wants to kiss him stupid. Thinks, _that's_ what you're worried about on the day I'm due to end you? How open I am for you?

Mark rolls his hips against Johnny's to punctuate his point. "We've hardly done anything but fuck for the last three days, Johnny. I can take it. _Fuck_ me." He can see them both in the bathroom mirror over Johnny's shoulder, Johnny's tattoo snaking around his body and hypnotising him. He's never wanted anything more than to be filled by Johnny, to have his cock buried to the hilt inside him. He's never felt more like himself, or less like himself, as he has in this moment, and it feels _good_ . "And I want to feel it _everywhere_."

Johnny kisses him hard, rough and eager, just like Mark was hoping, and then he slides an arm around Mark's waist, between him and the wall, and lifts him off the floor with ease. Mark wraps his legs around Johnny's waist, chin in the crook of Johnny's neck, and watches the way that the muscles in Johnny's ass tighten in anticipation. When Johnny slips into him, it's not as comfortable as it's been before, but that's what Mark wants. It's what he's been thinking about since the day that he opened that file labelled Operation Neo and was met with a photo of the man who is now inside him, went home and got off to the thought of being touched by him.

They fuck and Mark thinks about the day he opened that file, and he wonders how close he came to getting a different job. He holds onto Johnny tightly, rolls his hips to the rhythm of Johnny's thrusts and bites down on his tongue. He can't feel anything but Johnny right now, inside his head, his blood, his bones. He doesn't need a mask anymore, Johnny's seen everything, and yet— yet one of them still has to die or risk fucking up their whole career. 

Water runs over Mark's face, into his mouth as he gasps for breath. "Wait," he breathes out, voice shaky.

Johnny grunts and draws his hips back, until he's hardly inside Mark at all. "Are you okay?" he asks, hoisting Mark up a little more. Mark presses a kiss to the cupids bow of Johnny's lips and smiles.

"Just wanted to see your face." Mark blinks water out of his eyes. "Want you to look me in the eyes and fuck me hard."

Johnny groans. " _Fuck_ , Mark, you're— god, you're—"

"I'm the enemy," Mark tells him and tightens his grip around Johnny's waist with his thighs, drawing him inside again. He tenses, squeezing against the length Johnny's cock inside of him and relishes in the way that Johnny's eyes darken over with pleasure.

This time, Johnny fucks into him with the force he was hoping for, over and over, relentless. Mark cries out, can't help himself, and lets Johnny lean in and cover his mouth in a deep kiss, messy and urgent. Mark comes untouched, cock pressed between them, and bites down on Johnny's shoulder as Johnny fucks him through his come down, coming with a sharp hiss of Mark's name.

Mark can barely walk back to the bedroom and he thinks the sweet ache between his legs and in his thighs alone could get him hard again. He's boneless, now.

Still, he could have a gun against Johnny's head in less than three seconds if it came to it.

* * *

Johnny feels like he's floating through a river of silk. Mark's skin is rich cream under his hands, soft and pliable, and blossoming in pink marks where he's pressed his thumb down into his skin softly, just to feel Mark alive underneath him for a while longer.

He wonders what Donghyuck, who took over as head of the organisation two years ago, who is young and ruthless and who everyone is equally in reverence and terrified of, would say to him if he knew what one of his agents was doing while the secrets he was employed to extract are still held by the businessmen who brought them to the city, men who are alive and well, and none the wiser. In a way, he realises that Mark's side are getting exactly what they want out of this. Their secrets are safe, their agent is alive.

Still, they must know he is dangerous to send so many agents after him. They must know that he won't be expected to stop until he has what Donghyuck wants. Mark is expendable, just like the rest.

They lie together in the bed, under white sheets and a white ceiling, and Johnny thinks about how much red he's seen stain white things before. He can almost taste it, the copper of blood.

“Not long now," Mark says, as if he can read Johnny's mind. "Not long until the Choi-Johnson group leaves town and either you kill me and get to them before they get on their plane to finish your job or I finish mine and you don’t leave the city ever again. Not alive, anyway.”

“I don’t ever want to leave this room again, if I can help it." Johnny pulls Mark closer into a hug. Their hair has dried since they fucked in the shower, and they've drank a bottle of hotel champagne because, as Johnny had said, it's not like he's the one paying for the mini-bar. “I’m happy just here.”

Mark avoids his eye contact. “Johnny…”

“Look, I don’t even care about the secrets," Johnny admits. "I don’t want to find them, I don't think I ever really did. And now I have enough of my own to last a lifetime.”

“But if you don’t… What will happen if you don’t finish your job? Your side wants that information. They sent you here to get it because you're fucking _good_. I read your file, remember.” When Mark does look at him, his eyes are worried, and Johnny struggles to connect the self-assured demon he fucked in the shower with the loyal-to-a-fault agent here. "You've never failed a mission before."

"Neither have you." Johnny shrugs and gives Mark a wry smile. “Anyway, my file handler can probably come up with a story for me, if he hasn’t given up on me by then. Then I might have to go through an investigation, might be given the grunt-work for a few years as a punishment. I might be re-assigned, whatever."

The possibilities are endless. They might just get rid of him entirely— kill him or remove his identify or send him to the suburbs, like they did with Jaehyun.

Mark hums. “You know," he says, "I used to think that death— actual death— was preferable to being reassigned out of the field. To being a case handler or a desk clerk or whatever. I still did until... Until maybe right now.”

“You’d look good in a leather desk chair. Or— no, _I’d_ look good in a leather chair, you’d look better on your knees underneath the desk, trying not to choke on my cock while I hold a conference call.” Johnny smiles.

Mark smiles back at him, and it's a gorgeous sight. "That's a detailed image. Would you fuck me against the desk after?" he asks. He doesn't even blush.

"Of course I would. Bend you over it. You'd have to shove your fist against your mouth not to have security running in to check on you because of your screams, my dick is that good."

Mark laughs at the thought. "It's a shame it'll never happen," he says.

Johnny trails patterns against the bare skin of Mark's side. "Maybe not. But this might not be the end... The world is full of possibilities."

They lie in silence for a while, as time passes them by. They have less than four hours now until they both have to confirm their missions a success, or deal with the consequences of failing.

“I’m not going to kill you,” Mark tells him, looking up at him with bright, wide eyes, filled with a hope that makes Johnny feel kind of sad. “And you’re not going to kill me. Or the back-up agent tracking me. He’s a good guy.”

“If he tries something, Mark, I’m going to have to—“

Mark interrupts, “It won't come to that."”

Johnny knows there is no way Mark can know this for sure, and there is nothing convincing about the look in his eye.

“ _It won’t,_ ” Mark repeats and Johnny thinks, _fuck it_ , it’s worth the risk.

He says, “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah, okay. No one’s dying tonight.” Johnny feels a weight that he even didn't know he was carrying lift from his shoulders. "Hey, lets nap for a little while and then do you want to go for a coffee? I know a nice, quiet place you might have been to it before."

* * *

The cafe is near empty, aside from a woman working on her laptop in the window seat, headphones in and fingertips moving over the keyboard like they’re dancing.

“What if this ends badly for one of us?" Mark asks, playing with the napkin in front of him. He doesn't even know what badly would _look_ like. Death, he guesses. One of their deaths. Both of their deaths, maybe. Or something worse than death, like being a disappointment? What would his parents think, he wonders, if they knew his predicament.

“It won't. It's never ended badly for me or you before," Johnny shrugs, matter of fact. "That’s why we are still breathing and many, many men aren't.”

Mark is reminded that the people Johnny's killed could be people he's known. That people he's killed could be people Johnny's cared about before. It's so fucked up. Weirdly, it makes him smile. “Hmm, I could change my mind about this. I could call in my back up. Or we could have a stand-off right here. Whoever shoots first wins.”

He won't, of course. They both know this. Johnny raises an eyebrow.

"I could do it," Mark says.

“And upset that nice server at the counter? The girl writing the next Pulitzer Prize winning novel in the window?" Johnny looks around. "I know you could do it," he says, softly. "You could have done it days ago and _I_ could have done it first, but this isn't about what we _could_ do, is it?"

Mark reaches out and lets Johnny take his hand. “What I'm going to do is close my eyes and count to fifty. _Then_ maybe I’ll shoot you," he says. 

Johnny smiles. "Can I kiss you first?" He leans over the table, one hand still in Marks, slides his other hand around the back of Mark's neck to pulls him in for a kiss. The girl beside the window glances up at them, and then back down at her laptop. Maybe she's guessing their story, he thinks.

They kiss and time stops, and Mark breathes out, deep and longing, when Johnny's touch leaves his skin. "Go on, then," Johnny whispers. "Count to fifty," and Mark does.

He counts steadily, eyes closed, his heartbeat in his ears, counting along with him. The draught from the opening of the door feels like pure relief when he feels it swoop through the cafe. When Mark opens his eyes, Johnny is gone, and there’s a note on the table, written on the back of a napkin:

_I’m in love. Hope to see you soon, J x_

Mark waves the waitress over to pay for their drinks. “Was he your boyfriend?” She asks, gesturing to the door out of which Johnny has disappeared just minutes earlier. 

“No... It’s kinda, uh, a lot more complicated than that.” Mark stumbles over the words. "But, then, when has love ever been easy? Am I right?"

She gives him a nod and a soft, knowing, smile, but she doesn’t know at all. She’s lucky for it, Mark thinks. Ignorance can be beautiful, sometimes.

He leaves her a generous tip, and walks the long way back to his hotel to come up with an excuse for not killing Johnny Suh.

* * *

epilogue.

“So,” Mark starts. He can’t help but smile, a lop-sided half grin that he can feel radiate warmth deep in his bones. “ _This_ is what happens when the people in charge think you’ve lost your edge.”

Yuta looks wildly insulted. “I have never lost my edge.”

“Sorry, I mean it’s what happens to you when you fuck up on a job and still live to see the other side.” From the look on Yuta’s face, Mark thinks that maybe he didn’t phrase it any better, but it’s not _meant_ to be an insult. He’s never felt better for failing to kill someone. Killing someone, Mark has decided, is a fucking drain on the soul. Plus, now that he’s been re-assigned to desk duty he can invest in more plants for his balcony. “We’re still badass, obviously, despite our on-paper losses.”

Yuta’s expression doesn’t change even a little, like he’s refusing to give himself away, but Mark knows he’s right. Becoming a case handler for others is what happens to agents who no one can prove failed on purpose: this purgatory of paperwork and surveillance cameras. They share this failure, but to Mark it feels like a win. 

“It doesn’t seem too bad.” Mark runs his hands over the arms of the leather chair and gestures towards the floor-to-ceiling window separating him from the real world. “At least the windows have a decent view of the city. We can even see the park from up here.”

“Your enthusiasm about this metaphorical death sentence is adorable,” Yuta says. “It _will_ wane.” 

“Maybe.” Mark shrugs, because Yuta is probably right, but so what? It’s the circle of life, right? To be born, to kill, kill, kill, to stop killing and live in the suburbs, and have drinks with your colleagues after work. That gives Mark a thought. “Hey, you know you should come over to mine one weekend and have a few beers now you’re not my handler. We’re just, like, regular colleagues now.”

Yuta just looks at him. “Get Yeri’s next file ready, she’s coming in for a debrief later about the Velvet job, and then she’s ready to get back out on the field straight away. Joy wants her back out by the end of the week.”

Mark nods. “Yeri, Velvet job, debrief. Got it.”

“We could hang out.” Yuta hovers at the door, clearly desperate for a friend even if he refuses to admit it after Mark’s exposed him. They're all the same. “But I’ll only come over on the basis that you’ll help me take new photos for my grindr profile— _clothed_ photos, don’t look so scared— and that you’ll tell me everything that happened with Johnny Suh.”

“Johnny Suh, who’s that? I’ve never heard of him.” Mark grins, giddy with the weight of all his secrets, grateful for the fact he’s breathing and Johnny’s breathing, out there, somewhere. He’ll see him soon, Mark is _sure_ of it. He has kept the note to prove it, slipped into the back of his laptop bag where a dog-eared photo of a target once was “After all, I just work in I.T, like everyone else on this floor.”

He looks out of the window, over the park, across the city, and imagines Johnny is out there somewhere, watching him from the sprawling streets below. Maybe he is. Or, if not now, one day when it's raining and a stray cat follows Mark home.

On that day, Mark thinks, Johnny might be waiting in the shadow across the street.

He can't wait.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> leave me your thoughts! (and/or come see me @ [twitter](https://twitter.com/lilacsui) or [CC](https://curiouscat.me/rainingover))  
> 


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